Choosing the right web host is a really important decision because it affects your website speed, security and so much more. But the process is so unnecessarily difficult because the web hosting industry is so competitive and bombards consumers with confusing offers.

We’ve decided to publish this guide to simplify the decision because we found ourselves constantly helping our customers choose the best host for their needs. What follows is our picks of the web hosts with all the essential features that every modern website needs, organized into the best options for every budget.

My budget is:

ClickWP customers are hosted on many different web hosts. Our recommendations below are based on direct experience with these hosts and our observations over 5 years in business.

Disclaimer: Using the links below gives us a small commission. If you prefer not, use the direct link instead.

Most Affordable Web Hosts ($5–10)

While you can find web hosts that cost as little as $2/mo, the better quality ones start at about $7/mo. These hosts typically discount your first year heavily, so be aware that the renewal price will cost double. Web hosts in this category also allow multiple sites per account at no extra cost (on their higher tiers) so they are even more affordable for multiple sites.

Our top pick for this category is SiteGround’s GrowBig plan that costs $7.95/mo (they have a lower tier too). We have dozens of customers on SiteGround and these guys give the biggest bang for the buck.

The second option in this category is A2 Hosting. Their Swift plan is $4.90/mo and offers a reliable and consistent (if unremarkable) hosting service. This is a solid middle choice for those on a budget.

Drawbacks: Same drawbacks as SiteGround. We also didn’t appreciate the many upsell offers that make the signup process confusing. Just choose the basics and a server location closest to you when signing up.

Intermediate Solutions ($10–30)

Moving a step up, we enter the realm of managed WordPress hosting. These hosts manage technical stuff like site performance (speed), security, software updates and more which means you’ll get better results overall. Unlike the cheaper shared hosting options, you don’t share resources on managed hosts and you’ll never get shut down if you go over the limits.

Flywheel is ClickWP’s favorite web host, offering speedy and rock-solid hosting with premium features from only $15/mo! They will also migrate your website for free and offer free SSL for all customers. You can try Flywheel by creating a free account and launching a demo site.

Why you’ll love it: Flywheel gives you the biggest bang for the buck you can get from a managed WordPress hosting company. Plus, they are just so fun.

Drawbacks: Like other managed WordPress hosts, Flywheel doesn’t offer email services. Support outside of US and Europe is slow but improving.

WP Engine is one of the pioneers of managed WordPress hosting and introduced 1-click staging sites which are now almost a standard feature in all managed WordPress hosts. Customers of WP Engine can expect the excellent support and an aggressive emphasis on speed.

Why you’ll love it: Their live chat is available 24 hours a day and genuinely helpful. I’ve always been impressed by their support staff.

Drawbacks: WP Engine can be rather aggressive with their caching and content updates may not appear until several minutes later.

Top-tier Infrastructure (~$100)

Consider popular web services like Facebook or Gmail. These websites don’t operate from a single server, but from a global cloud network. That’s how the companies in this category host your WordPress website.

ClickWP has been hosted on Kinsta since early–2014 and we’ve been very happy with their service. Kinsta obsessively optimizes their platform for speedy sites so our website loads quickly even without much optimization. We only worry about our customers’ hosting, never about our own hosting.

Why you’ll love it: Super performance matched by super support. Their support team responds in minutes and is always able to resolve your issue.

We don’t have direct experience with Pressidium, but they were one of our shortlisted hosts before we ultimately decided on Kinsta. Pressidium also earns high praise from industry experts. Pressidium engineers smarter than mortals like us tweak and tune their platform for maximum performance.

Why you’ll love it: Cloud infrastructure and all the features you’d expect from a top tier host. While their base plans are indeed ~$100/mo, they have a Micro plan that costs only $24.90/mo.

What About VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting?

In our opinion, VPS hosting like Digital Ocean is more trouble than it’s worth. Yes you get more performance for the price compared to most affordable and intermediate hosts, but you are responsible for managing the server yourself and support from the web host is limited. You can simplify this by getting a VPS with a control panel, but that adds to the price considerably. Once you factor all that in, the intermediate solutions look more attractive.

If you do really need a general purpose hosting company that is more powerful than the most affordable options, consider Webfaction (read my personal review of Webfaction).

What Next?

Now that you’ve decided on your new host, you’ll probably need to migrate your website. ClickWP can migrate your website for you at no cost. Contact us to find out more.

Did you know that ClickWP offers hosting too? Our hosting packages are add-ons to our Foundations plan so it’s a single affordable price for both website care and hosting. Learn more.

And finally if you found this guide useful, please share it with your friends. Thanks!

Five years ago today, I launched ClickWP to the world (with a Hello World post, no less). Back then, I didn’t even know if ClickWP would still exist in 2016. Therefore I am super grateful and humbled that we are not only still in business, but healthy as well.

To mark this occasion, I am happy to announce a new product and our first ever sale.

The Growing Needs of Website Owners

I started ClickWP because I saw a need for reliable and dependable WordPress support, so that business owners and small publishers could save time and avoid speed bumps with their websites. Our original website care plans offered backups, weekly maintenance and tech support and has served that need faithfully for the past 5 years.

But the landscape has evolved and I now notice the average WordPress user needs more. Website owners today know that need to grow an email list and focus on conversions in order to be successful. This means on top of a domain, hosting, theme, branding, and content, you also need a solution for email opt-in, registrations and payment forms, as well as professional landing pages that direct your visitors to sign up, buy or download.

The barrier to entry has grown higher, and the learning curve has grown steeper. In light of these reasons, I am excited to officially announce the Foundations Plan.

Introducing the Foundations Plan

Our new plan aims to help website owners meet the challenges of today by including a suite of essential business tools, on top of the requisite website care. Customers of this plan will have access to:

Email list builder plugin

Landing page builder plugin

Contact & payment forms plugin

Mobile-friendly website themes

You can use these tools right away, no need to worry about licenses and renewals. You’ll save time because we’ve curated these plugins and themes to ensure that they all integrate together smoothly.

Our ClickWP Caretakers will assist every new Foundations customer setup their website (or landing page) and email opt-in forms to launch a new and complete web presence in just days. In the coming months, we’ll even introduce education programs to empower our customers to take advantage of these tools more effectively.

And finally, you can add on a hosting package to your plan for as little as $5/mo. For that price you get premium hosting with SSL – you’ll be hard pressed to find a better deal elsewhere.

Our First Ever Sale

ClickWP has never had a sale before, so this is another first for us. For the next 5 weeks, save $50 off the setup fee for the Foundations Plan, in conjunction with our 5th anniversary.

I also want to offer our existing customers something extra, because ClickWP would not have achieved this milestone without you. Check your inboxes for exclusive customer-only offers.

Here’s To The Future

It’s still only October but I’m very excited about 2017. We have lots of plans, and finally the resources to carry them out. It feels like we’re just hitting our stride.

In closing I have to say that I wouldn’t have arrived at this milestone on my own. I want to thank Dana, the most senior member of the team, and to Joel and Buena at JSR Web Solutions. Most of all, I am truly thankful to all of our clients and friends for your business and support. ClickWP wouldn’t be here without you.

Yoast SEO is a comprehensive plugin to help increase your visibility in search rankings and social media. Using this plugin won’t replace your online marketing activities, but it will set the foundation for your online marketing success. It paves the road for potential traffic to your website.

New users are often intimidated with how to use Yoast SEO because it is so chock full of features. On top of that, Yoast SEO tutorials always use technical phrases and acronyms like on-page SEO, SERPs, Open Graph meta and more. This article will guide you through the essential setup and basic use of the plugin using plain English as much as we can.

We’re not aiming to teach you all of Yoast SEO’s features (there is a training course for that). Most website owners aren’t going to make use of all the plugin features anyway. My goal is to show you the settings you must configure and give you a quick overview of it’s most important features. Ready? Let’s go!

Essential Setup for Yoast SEO

The first step, of course, is to install the Yoast SEO plugin. Go to the Plugins → Add New screen and search for Yoast SEO, then install and activate it if you haven’t already.

Yoast SEO in the admin screens

With the plugin activated, you’ll find a new SEO item in the WordPress dashboard navigation. You’ll also see a prompt to start the tour. Do the tour or dismiss it. Now, to configure the most important settings for the plugin.

We’ve organized the article according to the pages in the plugin settings and highlighted the specific tabs you should configure with checkboxes. Some settings pages are not mentioned because they are more “advanced” than “essential” but you can learn about them with the inline Help Center on almost all of the Yoast SEO settings pages.

General settings

General settings for Yoast SEO and your website.

Your Info

The info you provide in this tab helps identify your website to Google. If you’re a company, Google may use the company name and logo in the Knowledge Panel in the search results.

The Knowledge Panel in Google’s search results

Webmaster Tools

You probably won’t need to use the Webmaster Tools tab immediately, so bookmark this for later. This is where you can verify ownership of your site for Alexa, Bing, Google and Yandex with the meta tag verification method.

Titles & Metas

These are the settings that control the appearance of your website in search engines and social media. Every page on your site (even the automatically generated ones e.g. error pages) has a page title, and meta descriptions are automatically generated by the search engine. The settings here determine the default page titles and meta descriptions on your site.

The defaults for this section are quite good, so the only settings to configure are on the Homepage tab. Feel free to explore the other tabs if you like.

Homepage

Depending on how your site is setup, you will either see:

Fields for the title template and meta description template. Replace the default text here with what you want to appear in the search results like the example above. Ideally this should describe your site and include the keywords that you want to be found for. You don’t need to use the template tags (the stuff that looks like %%sitename%%).

Or, you may see a message saying you can edit the front page and blog page itself. If this is what you see, skip this setting for now and we’ll address it in the Basic Usage section.

Social

Yes, Yoast SEO helps you optimize for social media too! Before we jump into the settings here, go edit your profile (click on your name in the top right of the screen) and enter your social media account info under the Contact Info section.

Now come back to SEO → Social. The tabs in this section determine how content on your site looks when shared to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+.

Facebook link preview with no optimizationSame link with optimized preview

Keep in mind that these are general social settings that define the defaults. You can customize the link previews for each page or post as well.

Accounts tab

Enter the links to your social profiles. Don’t forget to include the http://

Facebook

The Frontpage settings tell Facebook how to display your site when someone shares the homepage. (Note: This may be hidden if you your website doesn’t display the blog on the homepage.)

Your image must be 1200×628 pixels to appear like the optimized preview in the example above. Use a custom title and description, or copy it from the search Titles & Metas settings.

You can also upload a a default image for pages and posts that don’t have images under the Default settings section. Again, your image should be 1200×628 pixels.

Finally, if you use Facebook Insights you can define an admin and add the necessary meta tags to your site – not an essential setting, feel free to skip.

Twitter

We suggest changing the Twitter card type to Summary with large image. However if you aren’t going to use a featured image for each post, the Summary card may be better.

Pinterest

The only setting here is to confirm your website with Pinterest using the meta tag method. Skip this if you have previously confirmed your site with Pinterest.

Google+

If you have a Google+ page for your business, add that URL here. Now go to edit your Google+ page and add your website as a link on the About tab.

Search Console

If you use Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools), go to SEO → Search Console and click the Get Google Authorization Code button. Once you complete the authorization process, this screen will display data from your Google Search Console.

Yoast SEO Page Optimization Basics

Your website is already more visible after configuring the essential settings above. But you can really make it stand out by spending some time to optimize each piece of content before you publish it. Using Yoast SEO helps in 2 main ways:

First, it puts the words that your target audience uses in the page title and meta description. The person searching is more likely to click on a result that contains the exact words he is searching for.

Second, Yoast SEO can make your pages more attractive in social media news feeds to generate more clicks and traffic to your website.

Let’s take this article as an example. There are already a lot of other Yoast SEO tutorials on the web, so my hook to differentiate it from the rest is to write a plain English guide.

But almost nobody is searching for plain english guide to yoast seo. They’re searching for yoast seo tutorial, how to use yoast seo or something related. So for maximum visibility, I want to make sure I use keywords and phrases like these in my page title and meta description.

Other terms that people use when searching for this topic

At the same time, I don’t want Facebook and Twitter users to say, oh it’s just another how-to on this plugin. Therefore I want to play up the plain English aspect of this article with a tailored headline, description and image for social media.

In other words, I’m using different words for people in searching/learning mode and for social media users in browsing/reading mode. Let’s take a look at how you do this with Yoast SEO.

The Yoast SEO Options Box

The Yoast SEO plugin adds an option box (meta box) to the Add/Edit screens in WordPress – see the screenshot below. Along the side are 3 vertical tabs – a traffic light, advanced and social settings.

The Traffic Light tab

The default content tab (the traffic light) contains a field called Focus Keyword. I recommend filling out this field first. The focus keyword is a writing tool to help you create content optimized for that keyword. For this article, my focus keyword is how to use yoast seo i.e. this is the search phrase I want to rank for. Once I type in the focus keyword (or phrase), Yoast SEO immediately grades my content in the Content Analysis section below. The goal is to get as many green bullets as needed until the traffic light icon shows a green light.

Right now however, Yoast SEO is telling me that my focus keyword doesn’t appear in the page title, meta description and URL. I’ll fix this by clicking the Edit snippet button to define the title and meta description for this page. The length indicator turns green when you meet the optimal length.

Content analysis with Yoast SEO – click for larger version

After the previous step you should have several green bullets. Read the descriptions for the red and orange bullets and adjust the content of your article. Eventually you’ll get enough so that the traffic light turns green. You can stop here because you shouldn’t over-optimize your content and aim for all green bullets.

The Social tab

The social tab is where we define a different title and description for Facebook and Twitter, if you don’t want it to follow the ones set in the traffic light tab.

For this article, my page title is rather descriptive to fit in the focus keyword. But for Facebook and Twitter, I’m going for something more striking and play up the plain English aspect of this article. I also don’t need to include the focus keyword.

Social optimization with Yoast SEO – click for larger version

Finally, the link previews in Facebook and Twitter will use the Featured Image. Upload a different image if you prefer.

Phew! We’re finally done with all the essential optimizations. Time to publish the post and celebrate with a cold beverage.

Tip: You don’t have to optimize every page on your site. Prioritize the most important pages, and do as little or as much as you need to meet your marketing goals.

Bonus Tips & Further Reading

I hope that this article helped make Yoast SEO and optimizing your website content more accessible. Here are some resources if you’d like to learn more.

Inline Help Center

Yoast SEO Help Center – click for larger version

There is a Help center on all of the settings pages. Watch the videos and read the explanations to understand the settings further.

SO Hide SEO Bloat plugin

The Yoast SEO plugin makes use of prominent notices and callouts. Those of you who find them annoying can hide them by installing the SO Hide SEO Bloat plugin.

The Beginners Guide to SEO by Moz
This is a bible for anyone who really wants to learn about SEO. If you’re short on time, I recommend reading Chapter 5 on Keyword Research since that is such an important aspect of this field.

I’m honored and delighted to be speaking at the inaugural Genesis Camp, an online conference dedicated to the Genesis Framework. My #GenesisWP buddies had this idea to do a community event a while ago and the volunteers have put in lots of effort to make this conference happen.

Genesis Camp starts this weekend (2000 GMT on Saturday) and will go on for more than 24 hours. I am presenting alongside personalities (and personal heroes) like Chris Lema, David Decker, Bill Erickson and Jesse Petersen. My 2 sessions are:

WordPress.com is a service that makes it incredibly easy to start a website or blog. Indeed, millions of people around the world use the service to publish their content to the web. In fact, you may have started your own blog on WordPress.com, as I did. And you may have also begun to bump up against the limits of WordPress.com.

Like myself and so many others, you may have come to realize that there are many things you can’t do on WordPress.com. As a serious blogger or publisher, you’ll inevitably wonder if your potential to grow your readership and ultimately make some money is being limited.

The alternative, as you have no doubt heard, is the WordPress.org option – install WordPress yourself on your own server a.k.a. self-hosted WordPress. “Yikes! That sounds hard. Why would I do that?” you ask.

WordPress.com is kind of like renting a house or apartment. It’s brilliant in some respects – if your toilet starts leaking, someone else has to pay for the plumber. But you can’t, for instance, paint your walls purple, add an extra bedroom or replace all the light fittings with disco balls. In website terms, WordPress.com ensures you don’t get bothered by spam and hackers, but you can’t add star ratings to your review site or use different social sharing buttons if you need them.

Self-hosted WordPress is like buying your own place. It’s awesome in that you can do any old thing you like, such as installing an outdoor spa, building your own shed or keeping a pet goat in your spare room (probably not the best idea). But with self-hosted WordPress you also have more responsibility, like ensuring your site doesn’t crash or get hacked (luckily there are excellent services for that).

Should I stay or should I go?

So now you’re at a fork in the road – forgo some features and stay within the safe and easy walls of WordPress.com, or brave the added responsibility of self-hosted WordPress in return for all the features you need?

I found myself with this decision too. When I started my savings blog, I had a vague idea that I would get it up and running by myself, start writing regular posts and see where it took me. But I quickly realized that if I wanted to eventually try and make it into a serious endeavor, I’d need to upgrade to self-hosted WordPress.

After wrestling with the decision for some time, I decided to take the plunge. Here’s how I made my decision.

1. You Need Advertising

WordPress.com does not allow image ads or third-party advertising networks like Google AdSense, OpenX, Lijit, BuySellAds, and Vibrant Media, limiting my potential income. Their plans that did allow advertising start at $500/month (!) and their in-house ads feature is limited to “bloggers with moderate to high traffic”. Sigh, not an option for my new blog. I decided after just a few months to switch over to self-hosted WordPress, where I’ve now signed up for Nuffnang (a social advertising network).

2. You Need To Grow An Email List

Building subscriber numbers is important if you want to get your readers coming back. WordPress.com includes a simple email subscription feature. Unfortunately, it’s pretty limited and you can’t personalize your sign-up forms or email design.

You also can’t embed a MailChimp sign-up form to attract subscribers, which was a major turn-off for me. From what I could see, MailChimp was one of the best ways to create newsletters at the price that I could afford, and most of the more professional bloggers seemed to be using it. After moving to self-hosted WordPress, I was able to embed (and personalize) a MailChimp sign-up form and start growing subscribers.

3. You Need Analytics And Optimization Tools

Finding out how many people are reading your site, where they’re from and which of your content they’re interested in is crucial. WordPress.com offers a great stats feature, but it does not support third party analytics such as Google Analytics (unless you are on Business or better). You also can’t install conversion optimization and A/B testing services unless you upgrade to self-hosted WordPress.

4. You Need More Features And Designs

WordPress.com is great when you’re starting out and want to keep to a strict budget, but can be quite limiting because you can’t take advantage of plugins (add-ons for WordPress that add new features to your site).

Because I have dreams to sell an online guide or ebook in the future, I wanted to be able to use WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads one day. I’m not at this stage yet, but many bloggers, or businesses running websites, eventually want to allow their readers/potential customers to join in discussion forums or post reviews about their business. This can be done on the self-hosted version of WordPress, along with many other features.

I also wanted to customize my blog’s color scheme and fonts. This would have cost me $99/yr on WordPress.com, but on my self-hosted WordPress site, I installed this free theme called Make which includes similar features at no extra cost. I have literally thousands of other themes to choose from, and can hire a designer to create a completely custom design in the future if I choose.

5. You Want To Tinker

This wasn’t a big decision point for me, but you may be someone who wants to learn about how websites work, or just have fun experimenting. While you can still learn a lot on WordPress.com, you can learn and do a lot more on a self-hosted WordPress site.

WordPress is a great platform to tinker on as well because it’s license allows and encourages tinkering, and there is a huge international community of users who learn together, help each other and create plugins and themes for WordPress. You can connect with the community through the official forums, Facebook groups, meetups and official events throughout the world.

If you’re a budding web designer, developer or even marketer, a self-hosted WordPress site is definitely the better platform to grow your skills. Just be prepared to break your site occasionally

Ready to switch?

Now that you’ve decided to switch, you’ll find that the biggest hurdle is the move itself. It’s a multi-step process which can be rather intimidating. Here is a high-level overview of the steps involved.

Purchase a domain, or transfer it from WordPress.com

Purchase a web hosting plan and install WordPress

Export your posts, then import into the new site

Transfer stats, blog followers and subscribers with the Jetpack plugin

If moving your site seems too daunting, the WordPress.com folks have a Guided Transfer service that will perform the migration for you.

ClickWP has a WordPress.com Migration service too. We’ll even throw in a complimentary 2-month support plan to make sure you settle in nicely into your new site and help you with any problems.

As I mentioned, moving is the biggest hurdle in switching to self-hosted WordPress, but it’s definitely worth it. Once you’ve completed the move, your pet goat can move into that spare bedroom and there’s nothing holding your blog back!

If you’re building a website for the first time, it can be daunting to know where to start or even just understanding the available options. Your options for creating a website range from cheap do-it-yourself solutions to fully custom websites with all the bells and whistles. Somewhere in the middle of this spectrum of choices lie 2 popular options: website setup and website customization.

This article will explain these starter options so you can decide if this is the route you should go.

Website Setup

Website setups are the most basic option available and are a step up from building the website yourself. A typical website setup package will include a website developer installing the WordPress software, an off-the-shelf theme, and configuring all the important settings. This is a budget option, as there is minimal work for the developer because they are simply putting off-the-shelf components together and not writing any code for your site.

Website setup packages usually also include some personalization. For instance, you should be able to add your own logo, and change the colours to match your branding.

Because this option makes use of off-the-shelf components, it’s important to choose the right design and layout that will best get your message across at the outset. A photographer wanting to showcase their portfolio will likely want a very different look to a financial services firm. Knowing your goals, you must then choose a website theme (design) that has most or all of the features you need. The website developer will then create your website with the chosen theme.

Prices for a basic website setup start from around $100. Graphically Designing offers a ‘24 hour website’ package which includes a theme installation, site setup, installation of plugins and updated colours and fonts. Web design studio Restored 316 will install and setup one of the themes from their shop at a similar price point in their ‘Sparkle’ package.

Graphically Designing’s website packages. Let Susan know we sent you

Both Graphically Designing and Restored 316 offer higher value packages with a more extensive scope of work (Semi-custom and Shine respectively). These higher value packages are the 2nd option we’ll explore today – Theme customization.

Theme Customization

This is the next level up from a basic website setup and costs more because the developer spends more time with you to modify the theme to include more customized elements. They may even add new features to the site by installing and configuring additional plugins.

The additional work means that customization packages will cost more than website setups; expect to pay about $500 onward for packages like this. If you need custom graphic elements as well, expect to incur graphic design fees too.

While a basic website set-up is like buying a car with standard options, a customization package is akin to getting a custom paint job, upgrade air-conditioning, a new stereo system and better suspension.

A visual example may help to illustrate the point. The Metro theme is a popular theme made by theme company StudioPress. It features a cool background fade-in effect and here’s what it looks like without any customizations:

Metro theme by StudioPress. Click to view demo site.

The Web Princess and Phase Creative used it as the base for hiking and adventure blog Lotsafreshair. With a bright color scheme it looks quite different from the original Metro theme, but the work and investment involved was only for the design elements and didn’t involve creating the theme from scratch.

Lotsafreshair was built on top of the Metro theme. Click to view site.

David Coleman’s popular photo blog – Have Camera Will Travel – is another example of a site built on the Metro theme. This example has more extensive customizations to the layout, but you can still see it still sports the Metro theme footer and background fade-in effect.

Have Camera Will Travel was built on top of the Metro theme. Click to view site.

Here’s another example where an off-the-shelf theme has been tweaked to provide a unique look. Parallax Pro is another popular theme from StudioPress. It features a full-width, edge-to-edge layout with parallax scrolling effect on the images. Here’s how it looks:

Parallax Pro by StudioPress. Click to view demo site.

Michelle Martello of Minima Designs swapped out the fonts, added some color and an email optin bar for a stylish, professional website design.

Minima Designs is built on top of Parallax Pro. Click to view site.

A theme customization is still a much cheaper option than designing and developing a website from scratch, but you get a more personalized result than a basic website setup. It may be a good halfway option if you need something a bit more specific, but don’t have a large budget.

Typically, customization packages have a set number of custom elements to keep the scope of work predictable and manageable. However if you need more features and more customizations, the cost can balloon quickly.

Molly and Luanne at Clean Food Dirty Girl recently revamped their website. They had wanted to use a customized version of Parallax Pro, but ended up adding an email signup form, latest blog posts, testimonials and even removed the parallax feature. They even got a new logo and professional photos taken.

Although you can see that the result is inspired a lot by Parallax Pro’s design, the site and theme is quite different. The cost of a project like this would far exceed an ordinary customization package and is closer to a fully custom website solution. Theme customization is more flexible but can add up in cost too, so keep additional modifications to a minimum if you are on a budget.

Ready For Your Own Website?

I hope I’ve managed to explain the differences between website setup and website customization packages. If you have decided on the best option for you, please let us know in the comments and how you arrived at that decision. I’m sure others would find your reasons helpful as they figure out the best options for themselves.

Now that you understand the options, I’d like to invite you to explore ClickWP’s own website setup package. Our ClickStart package includes website setup, basic design customizations and essential optimizations like social sharing buttons and a you@yourwebsite.com email address for only $299. Learn more about ClickStart or get in touch if you have questions.

Beaver Builder is a WordPress page builder plugin that allows you to build complex page layouts in an intuitive drag-and-drop interface.

As WordPress evolves beyond the blog, building attractive sites with modern layouts have become an increasing challenge. Theme developers like StudioPress have attempted to solve this by using custom page templates with styled widget areas. For example, the Centric Pro and Agency Pro themes have home pages built entirely with widget.

But what if you need custom layouts for other pages? For example, a services page or product landing page? You’d have to make multiple page templates for each unique layout and your Widgets page would be overflowing.

Furthermore I argue that widgets are secondary content. Your pages are primary content and deserve a better solution.

A Better Solution

Page builders are a better solution for creating custom page layouts in WordPress. With Beaver Builder, you see your layout come together as you are building it with it’s intuitive interface. It’s page builder mode looks much like the WordPress Customizer. You simply drag and drop modules on to the page and arrange them into rows and columns to build your layout.

Beaver Builder comes with modules like Slideshow, Gallery, Content Slider, Text Editor, Photo, Video, Testimonials, Buttons, Call to Action and more. If you need something custom like a Twitter timeline, you can use the HTML module to add it to your page. And if you’re a developer you can even create custom modules.

You can also create custom layouts for your store. Beaver Builder comes with a WooCommerce module to display your products on pages outside the store easily.

Since there are more mobile devices than human beings on the planet now, you’ll be glad to know that Beaver Builder layouts are mobile friendly too

Another really cool feature of Beaver Builder is the ability to style the rows containing the modules. You can have rows that fit within the content width, or rows that stretch the entire width of the screen for cool edge-to-edge layouts. You can also apply a background color or parallax image to the row. See the demos for examples.

Works With Any Theme

Beaver Builder represent a 2nd generation of page builders that exist as a companion to your theme rather than as part of the theme. The previous generation of page builders were integrated into the theme and typically makes extensive use of short codes. If you switched themes, your custom layouts would be lost and you’d be left with a mess of shortcodes.

This is an example of what you’ll get after switching away from a theme with shortcodes-based page editor

Because Beaver Builder is a plugin, you can switch themes and keep your custom page layouts as long as you continue to have Beaver Builder active. And if you do deactivate Beaver Builder, you’ll retain all your content – minus the layout – in the WordPress post editor.

Works Better When Themes Support It

Beaver Builder includes a theme called Automator. It includes support for full-width layouts so that you can create cool edge-to-edge layouts. It’s a decent theme with multiple color schemes and options.

If you want the edge-to-edge layouts but don’t want to switch to the Automator theme – no problem! You can add support for edge-to-edge layouts by adding a custom page template to your theme.

Here is the page template I use on the ClickWP website. Save the code below as template-page-builder.php and upload it to your theme’s directory.

Select this page template for the pages you want to use Beaver Builder on. Now launch the page builder mode and you’ll have edge-to-edge, full-width layout as your canvas to build your page on.

Select the Page Builder page template

Important Note: The code above only works with Genesis child themes because they all have the same HTML structure. It’s still possible to create a custom page template for other themes, but you’ll need to adapt the page template code for your own theme.

Pricing

Beaver Builder costs $99 for a Standard license. They also have Pro and Agency licenses for developers. All licenses allow the plugin to be used on unlimited sites and include 1 year of support and updates.

The company has also just released a lite version of Beaver Builder in the WordPress plugin repo. It only includes 5 modules – Text Editor, Photo, Video, HTML and sidebar – but you can create a pretty unique page even just with these free modules.

Is Beaver Builder For You?

It’s quite obvious from this review that I am a big fan of Beaver Builder. That being said, it’s not perfect. Here are some ways I think it falls a little short.

Learning curveDespite it’s intuitive interface, there are lots of things going on in Beaver Builder. Rows and columns and modules, settings for margins, padding and animation, etc – it all takes a little getting used to. Compared to content editors like Velocity Page and Barley, Beaver Builder is more powerful but more complex too. I wouldn’t recommend Beaver Builder to clients who aren’t proficient with the web.

Sluggish Page Builder
I also wish that the page builder mode was faster and more responsive. Compared to VelocityPage, Beaver Builder is a little sluggish to render and display content. A powerful page builder that is super quick might be opposing goals, but I can be hopeful.

Despite these minor niggles, I honestly believe that Beaver Builder is the best page builder WordPress plugin on the market. It’s a full-blown page builder, not a content editor with page templates. With Beaver Builder, your imagination is the limit.

If you want to check out and demo Beaver Builder, please use this link so they know I sent you: http://clickwp.me/beaver

]]>https://clickwp.com/blog/beaver-builder/feed/839036 tips from top bloggers for writing a great About Pagehttps://clickwp.com/blog/about-page-tips/
https://clickwp.com/blog/about-page-tips/#commentsThu, 16 Jan 2014 18:43:57 +0000http://clickwp.com/?p=2517

Editor’s note: In this post, Jade Craven from BloggersToWatch.com compiles the best tips to enhance your blog’s About Page

On nearly every website, the About Page is among the most visited pages. This one page can influence whether or not someone becomes a fan of your blog.

It is easy to write a mediocre About Page and slap it up on your blog. A compelling About Page can be difficult to write. It’s hard to know what information to include and what order to place it in.

In this post, I’ll walk through some of the ways you can make your About Page shine.

1. Tell them why they should care

All About Pages need a narrative. That much is a certain. However, many bloggers are so focused on telling their story that they forget to think about what the reader wants.

Share your story, but guess what it isn’t about you! Everything you tell them about you secretly must reveal something about them. Stand in the shoes of the person you’re talking to and tell them something that’s going to make them give a damn. Why might they care about this? If the connection between you and them isn’t clear, delete it.

John Haydon recommends that you “speak to them – as if they’re sitting across from you at a coffee shop. This person sitting across from you – what questions will they have about who you are and what you do?”

Rae Hoffman says that this is “your chance to tell the reader what they can expect from your content and why they should want to read it on the regular. And why your blog is different than the hundreds or thousands of others out there on the same topic”

More ideas – Steve Kamb thanks new readers at Nerd Fitness before sharing his goal to help his community. Debs explains how her site can help readers of Learn with Play at Home by describing why she started her blog.

2. Show the the best of your blog

Once you’ve stated why they should read, next show them what to read. Use the second part of your About page to provide plenty of opportunity for a visitor to dive in and experience your blog.

Link to blog posts telling key parts of your story. Joanna Penn does this masterfully on her About Page. You can expand on this by using these posts to create a ‘guided tour’ through the history of your blog.

People often make instinctive decisions about bloggers based on whether or not they feel a connection with the person. Your personality can be your biggest marketing tool. Just look at Ashley Ambirge from The Middle Finger Project.

4. Use photos to tell the story

Your “About” page tells the reader more about you and the goals of your blog/company, so placing a photo of yourself on this page can enhance the experience of your readers. By including a personal photograph, you are able to connect to your readers on a more personal level.

People enjoy being able to put a face to the person behind a blog or a business, and this is one of the most effective ways you can use images to not only increase the credibility of your blog, but help establish trusting relationships with your readers

I believe that photos are vital for a compelling About Page. If you have a photographer friend, consider a photoshoot for some high quality photos. Tip: Photoshoots outdoors or on-location in your home/office may be more affordable than studio shoots. High quality photos really stand out. Look at the About Pages for Rock N Roll Bride and Heartmade.

You can add words over the photos, like at In Spaces Between. Alternately, you can use the image to tell part of the story. Chantelle, from Fat Mum Slim, created a really cool infographic on her About Page. Neil Patel has a cool cartoon. How can you make your images stand out?

5. Social Proof

Don’t be shy about showing your readers your stuff. If you have posts that you’re particularly proud of because they’ve received lots of comment love, backlinks, or are just plain groovy in your humble opinion, then by all means, list them in your About Me page. And if you’ve created some applause worthy products, showcase them as well.

6. End with a call to action

Your About page is a great place to encourage those who’ve stuck with you until the end of the page, to keep going… but you do need to give them some direction. This goes hand in hand with the point above: once you’ve determined what you’d like your About page to do for your site and your readers, make sure you end strongly by giving readers pointers about the next steps to take, should they be interested.

Over to you

So now you have some excellent tips from top bloggers about writing an excellent About Page. Time to start writing!

What About Pages do you love? Let us know in the comments.

]]>https://clickwp.com/blog/about-page-tips/feed/42517Start the year on the right foot with this new year’s website checklisthttps://clickwp.com/blog/new-year-checklist/
Fri, 03 Jan 2014 02:53:19 +0000http://clickwp.com/?p=2508

Can you believe it’s a new year already? That means it’s time to make plans and get ready for the year ahead. Your website deserves a tune-up too, and we’ve put together a handy checklist for you to start off the year right.

1. Change your password

The start of the year is also a good time to update your passwords. You know that strong passwords should include lower and uppercase letters, numbers and symbols, but they’re always so hard to remember. Here’s a tip: Use random words with mixed capitalization, separated by symbols and numbers. Examples:

3. Update your About page and bio

The start of the year is a good time to review your About page which is usually the 2nd most popular page on your site. Make sure the information is current and consider using a storytelling writing style. Check out our 6 tips from top bloggers for writing a great About Page.

4. Review your policy and disclaimer pages

Your terms of service, privacy policy, affiliate and cookies disclaimer and other legal pages are important pages that are often neglected as well. Check them for stale dates and content and update them accordingly.

5. Check all your navigation, sidebar and footer links

Unless you’ve recently completed a full redesign of your site, chances are that you haven’t checked your website navigation, sidebar and footer links in the past 6 months. Make sure to click every link to ensure they don’t lead visitors to dead ends.

That question may be even more important than, “What’s your website address?”

Your email address is how potential customers, business partners or employers will communicate with you. What will they think if it’s bieberfan371@yahoo.com or stuckinthe90s@aol.com?

No! You need a professional me@mywebsite.com email address. In this article, we’ll tell you the 3 options for your own personalized, professional email address.

Option 1: Self-hosted email

Web hosting companies typically include email hosting in their packages. If you already host your own website, you can also host your email there at no extra cost. The exception is managed hosting companies like WP Engine or Synthesis who don’t provide email hosting at all.

When you host your own email, the web server for example.com also accepts emails to user@example.com. The user would then retrieve the email from the server.

This option allows you to create as many email accounts as you need, so self-hosted email is a good option if you need more than one address. You can either send and receive your email through an application like Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail, or through a simple webmail interface.

I would advise using a desktop email client with the IMAP protocol for best results. You should also regularly backup your email, just like you need to backup your website.

Pros

Included in your web hosting plan at no additional cost

Easy to setup

Cons

If your server experiences downtime, both website and email are affected.

The email mailboxes contributes to the disk space for your hosting account.

The webmail clients are really basic; you’ll be disappointed if you’re used to Gmail or Yahoo Mail.

Expect less than great support from your web host for email-related issues. Email is a secondary product which may not be high on their list of priorities.

Option 2: Redirect to webmail

The 2nd option is to use your web hosting only as a forwarder to redirect emails to your webmail service (e.g. Gmail / Yahoo / Outlook.com). This diagram explains how this works.

Emails to user@example.com are received by the server which then forwards them to the user’s webmail account. The user then retrieves the email from his webmail account. The user can configure his webmail to send emails as user@example.com – yes, even for Yahoo and Outlook.com!

This is a great option if you only need a small number of email addresses. You also wouldn’t need separate logins for your webmail and professional email. You can also redirect general email addresses (e.g. customerservice@example.com) to your webmail.

Pros

Use your favorite webmail service to send and receive your professional emails.

No need to worry about email backups on the server.

MS Outlook tells recipients the email was sent via your webmail

Cons

If your server experiences downtime, you will not be able to receive emails unless sent directly to your webmail address.

Email recipients will see that your email was sent via your webmail service unless you take a few extra steps.

Doesn’t scale well if you need multiple accounts for additional team members.

Note: It is possible to have Gmail fetch your email from external accounts but I find this solution to be sub-optimal. This is because Gmail only checks for new emails every 15 minutes. There are hacks to get around that, but they are usually rather complex to setup.

Update: We have published 2 KB articles on how to use Option #2 with Gmail and Yahoo:

Option 3: 3rd-party email provider

The final option is to use a dedicated email hosting provider for your email. Dedicated email hosting services can provide better features and support compared to free webmail services. Many also offer collaboration features like calendars and full-blown office suites.

With a setup like this, emails to user@example.com do not even land on the web server. MX records at the DNS level tell the emails that they should be routed directly to the email provider’s servers. This option can serve a single mailbox for yourself, or for your entire organization.

Personally, this is the option I recommend even for those who only need a single email address. However, you can set things up so you can send and receive from multiple domains into a single inbox, so with 1 login you can be me@mywebsite.com and me@anotherwebsite.com.

The biggest benefit: Unlike the other options, your email is not a secondary or free product. If your email is mission-critical, you need a dedicated email host that is accountable and responsible for your email.

Pros

Email unaffected by web server downtime

You can choose the best solution for your requirements

Cons

An additional cost for your business

Slightly more complicated to setup

Choosing an email host

There are lots of options for email hosting. Fastmail provides an email-centric offering which is easy to setup and use. Many businesses also use Microsoft Exchange, another email-centric offering. Domain registrars like Hover and GoDaddy also offer dedicated email hosting. On the other end of the scale are full-blown office suites like Google Apps and Office 365.

In my experience, many people find Google Apps confusing. They end up with multiple Google Accounts (personal and work) and get their logins mixed up – “Did I upload that video to my personal YouTube or the work YouTube. I didn’t even know there was a difference!”

Microsoft Exchange usually involves high costs and a “IT guy” who takes care of the servers, though I think companies like Rackspace and GoDaddy are trying to simplify things with their Hosted Exchange product. Either way, find someone who understands how mail servers work and engage them to help manage and administer things if you go with Google Apps or other enterprise-level solutions.

If you’re a small business who wants dedicated email hosting but to keep things as simple and affordable as possible, I can’t recommend Fastmail enough. They’re easy to understand, have a great product and are much simpler to setup and manage. I have used Fastmail to manage email for 5 different domains (!) for 3 years now and am extremely happy with my decision to go with them.

Finally, keep in mind that you can mix and match the 3 options above. So you could have 1 mailbox with Fastmail for the really important stuff, and forward the less important emails to Gmail. (I do this as well).

If email is important to you, you owe yourself to find a reliable and professional email solution.